Katukula

VILLAGE MZATI: Margret Banda

“When I tell my grandmother I want to be a doctor she welcomes the idea. She tells me, I want to be a doctor because I was never educated but you, you can be a doctor.”

When Headmaster James George Biani arrives to teach his seventh grade class, he often finds the other children gathered around Margret's desk, their attention rapt. She stops talking when she sees her teacher, but by the way they listen he can see his top math student has other talents as well.

“I can see by the way they are listening she is a storyteller,” he says.

Perhaps it's by dint of that sparkling imagination that Margret's been able to keep her ready childish laugh and a good store of optimism in spite of the adult-sized responsibilities she carries.

As much as he sees Margret's promise, Biani worries that there is no one in her family who will be able to afford high school fees in two years. Her father is disabled and her grandmother is getting old. They are just scraping by. Biani can tell. Working in Katukula, he has come to know what a hungry child looks like.

When Margret was just four, her mother sent her to help in the house of her grandmother. Since then, she has spent much of her childhood at work: cooking, carrying water, helping with the crops and polishing the cement floor with fistfuls of sand.

For years she saw almost nothing of the world beyond Katukula. So, on the day the doctor came to the school to vaccinate toddlers, Margret spotted her ticket to another kind of life.

“She was a woman doctor. I admired the way she wore a skirt, a shirt and a wrapper. I saw she dressed like us!”

Now, even as the other girls in her class are beginning to leave school for early marriages, Margret dreams of becoming a doctor.

“I will go to high school...The others might have boyfriends, but not me.”

“Fortunately enough we have a plot near the water where we are able to grow vegetables. I pay school fees by selling mustard, sugar cane and onions.” – Lisineti Makwenda, a 58-year-old farmer in Katukula.

Set on a low plain beside the Ntombodzi River, Katukula is a village of water. For much of the year three streams crisscross the village.

All of that water has proven a mixed blessing. During the Malawian winter in June, July and August, cabbage, tomatoes, onions and green maize thrive on the river's banks. But when the rains come in November and December, there is flooding. Roads wash away, and access to the houses on the far side of the river is impossible.

This year, concerned over the scant harvest, the women of Katukula decided to set up a shared family garden near the water.

“When the maize runs out this month or the one after, we can eat pumpkin greens, carrots and sweet potatoes,” says Elizabeth Daniel, village “headman” in Katukula. (A male or female leader can carry the traditional title of headman.)

After learning about CARE's plans to help set up village savings and loan groups in their community, some women said they were eager to take loans to buy fertilizer so that they can produce enough vegetables to sell outside of Katukula.

In the future, Katukula's leaders dream of managing their abundant water with dams and irrigation systems so that their town may be known across Kasungu for its fresh cabbage, sweet carrots and tart kale.